I get that it might be, but if I subscribed to all these news sites, the nytimes, the wsj, the economist, the information, the financial times, I'd be out a lot of money each month for what is basically an "I don't know how to use the icognito tab on my browser"-tax. I want to support these sites but they are too expensive, and it's too easy to circumvent their paywall. I actually subscribed to the nytimes for a month and I felt stupid for it, which is a weird feeling to have about it.
The Information has a real pay wall, and it's actually the most expensive out of this list, but if I subscribed to it, at least I wouldn't feel like a jackass for doing so. These companies want the Google crawling and the subscription fees, but it seems like you can only have one.
So, you are saying, if the NYT did not allow casual use, then you would be fine paying for it, but the fact that it allows you to check out the site 5-10 times/month for free, means that you are not okay paying for it.
Have you considered that if you are reading the site so often that you need to keep killing your cookies, that you perhaps might be getting some value from the site, and it wouldn't be unreasonable for you to to reward the creators of such great content?
> So, you are saying, if the NYT did not allow casual use
The NyTimes is not doing that for "casual use" they are doing it to allow Google's crawler access to the site so it can be indexed and show up on search engine result pages. This is why the incognito trick works on so many news websites.
> that you need to keep killing your cookies
I don't kill my cookies, I just cmd+shift+n to open incognito.
As for supporting sites I value, I visit so many of these sites, and read them, that I would potentially face financial ruin if I had to pay for them all. I get it, I want to support them, but I cannot, not at those prices, not when I can just open my incognito window, and not when even though I pay for the site I still have to deal with ads that roll down content as I'm trying to read it.
And I imagine you might have adblock enabled while you're sitting there judging me about not giving them cash for accessing the site. ;)
The incognito trick has nothing to do with the Googlebot. Sites can definitively know the Googlebot by its IP, and Google doesn't care about if other visitors with no referrer see a paywall. The probably reason the New York Times doesn't use a more comprehensive paywall is that those generally have failure modes like accidentally blocking humans who haven't been on your site before. Sites like the New York Times have weak paywalls to be user-friendly, not because it's required by Google.
It doesn't have anything to do with Googlebot, it has to do with Google's "ghosting" rules: You can't have inaccessible pages be indexed, you need to permit visitors X views free per day/month.
NYTimes has a leaky paywall to allow people to try their site, become interested, and then become subscribers. It has nothing to do with Google. Google only requires that a search result allows a person to click on results. WSJ has a stronger paywall that allows clicks through Google. That's why with the WSJ you have to do a search on a story headline, and then click on the results - you can't go directly through WSJ.
Re: Incognito Mode - the reason that works is it starts you out without any cookies. You've effectively cleared "all" your coookies.
Re: Supporting these sites - if you would really potentially face financial ruin, then that's a much different reason than you originally gave, which was that you felt like you would be a jackass for reading a site that you could hack into for free. The "I can't afford it" at least makes sense. I've personally decided that $3.75/week is worth it for me , but your financial situation may be different than mine, and I can at least appreciate that logic.
Re: Adblock - don't use it - though, not for any desire to support the sites, just isn't a big enough deal for me to worry about it.
>> "I want to support these sites but they are too expensive"
I've been thinking about this a bit recently. Back before these sites were free online we picked the publication we liked and purchased it. We didn't need to read every publication and someone who chose to read the NYT was informed on the same world events as someone who read the WSJ. Then the internet came along and we read bits of everything for free. Now we have to go back to the old model it feels strange - but it shouldn't. Whether you chose to subscribe to and read the NYT or WSJ doesn't matter. You'll get the same information each with it's own slant. Same as before. You aren't going to miss anything. The publications need to convince consumers that this is ok and they don't need to be checking 10 different publications each day. Whether they can do that or not is another thing (short attention spans appear to be a big and growing problem) but I've definitely tried to pare down the number of sites I read and subscribe to and I've tried to focus on the best sources rather than 10 almost identical stories with slight variations. I've found it freeing.
What we need is like a spotify for news. Anybody can put their news in and if a reader reads an article that news company gets part of the subscription fees.
I don't know if that would be better or worse though!
I like that idea. Although I have to say switching from lots of sources to a few good ones has increased my productivity (less time wasted reading similar articles). There are some things that I think people like NYT need to sort out with their subscriptions. Charging for web access separate from mobile access is a joke. Charge one fee ($20 per month) to read on any electronic device. I can't see how their current fragmented pricing model doesn't seriously hurt their conversion rate.
Well users could sort out by publisher so they can read news only from their local newspaper and/or the NYT or something else or if they'd rather read all tech news, a place like HN can be integrated somehow to allow for the dynamic community sorted news.
I think your argument fails to account for sites like Hacker News. Yeah, sure you'll get the more or less same information if only read one news site or the other, but if HN links to (say) the Economist, but you can't read it because you're only subscribed to the NYT, whilst others only have WSJ, then you're not reading and discussing the same article as everyone else.
I did exactly this... for a while. It just ends up being a huge pain in the ass. It's fine if you only ever go to the same sites, but it really becomes onerous when you use sites like, well, HN, which has you clicking on links to addresses that you've never visited before. Not worth the hassle imo.
